Bringing Bards to Campus : After organizing acclaimed readings for two dozen years, Doris Curran fears budget cuts and her health may spell the end of the series

Doris Curran has many memories of bizarre and benign encounters with the famous, nearly famous and moderately obscure writers she has invited to read in UCLA’s poetry series over the last 24 years.

There was the time Curran left the room for a few minutes and an unknown, incoherent man commandeered the stage, improvised a nonsensical introduction for visiting poet John Ashbery and passed out flyers about a trip to South America. Once a poet got lost in Westwood and was found just in time to give his reading. A poet with severe drinking and drug problems arrived in town two days earlier than expected but kept insisting he was ready to perform.

Since 1967, hundreds of writers have read their poetry at UCLA’s Sunset Canyon Recreation Center. Well-known poets W.S. Merwin, Seamus Heaney, James Merrill, Carolyn Kizer and Tess Gallagher are among them; just last month, Galway Kinnell and Sharon Olds, two prize-winning poets from New York, read on separate evenings. On Monday, Alice Fulton, a UCLA visiting professor of English, will read at 8 p.m. The series invites 10 to 15 poets to campus each year.

Yet despite its stellar cast, Curran fears that the Sunset Canyon series--the only forum that regularly presents poets reading their work to the UCLA community--may soon founder, the victim of budget cuts and Curran’s own faltering health.

A UCLA cultural programmer, Curran took an early retirement April 1 due to a host of health problems: heart disease, diabetes, failing eyesight, pernicious anemia. Yet she continues to go to campus four days a week to labor on the series. “Retirement so far is just exactly like working,” she said, laughing.

She hopes to be reappointed as a part-time, “casual” employee for the 1991-92 academic year if her health allows, but “if something should happen to me of an unpleasant nature--or even of a pleasant nature, if I should run off with (actor) Patrick Stewart, for instance--I don’t know what would happen,” Curran said. She’s also afraid the series’ $5,000-per-year budget for honorariums and travel expenses, paid for through student registration fees, may be reduced or eliminated in the university’s current budget troubles. “I can’t help being concerned about it, because the program has been my life for 20 years,” Curran said.

Michael DeLuca, UCLA’s cultural and recreational affairs associate director, said eliminating the poetry series is not among administrators’ current plans. “If the budget crunch gets worse, it may be out of our control, but it’s not at all in our wishes,” he said. “We still feel that the poetry series is a vital part of what we do. . . . I try to tell Doris not to overworry.”

Not everyone in the Los Angeles poetry community is completely enamored of the UCLA series. Eloise Klein Healy, a prominent Los Angeles poet who coordinates Cal State Northridge’s Women’s Studies Program, said she feels the series invites too many established, out-of-town poets to read. “They don’t tend to invite anybody who’s of experimental bent, or writing from marginalized experiences,” she said. “The series covers well-established territory, and maybe there could be a little more of a spicy mix in it.” But Fulton, the poet who will read Monday night, is more innovative than most invited to UCLA, Healy noted.

Fulton is the author of three books. Her first two won publication awards--one from the Associated Writing Programs, one from the National Poetry Series--and her most recent collection of poems, “Powers of Congress” (Godine, 1990), deals with sexuality, unorthodox religion and war. Fulton writes character pieces about other people, draws on history and philosophy, and also finds much material in her own life.

Raised in a small city in Upstate New York, Fulton described her upbringing as “lower middle-class.” Her father, a onetime bootlegger, owned a rooming house for transients and what Fulton called several “floating dance clubs” on a nearby river.

Eventually, she worked as a telephone operator, a photo lab technician and a disc jockey before going to college. She earned a master of fine arts degree from Cornell University and was hired as a tenure-track professor at the University of Michigan in 1983. Currently, Fulton is on leave from Ann Arbor, where she oversees a budget of $10,000 used to invite six poets a year to read their works at the university.

She’s impressed by the roster of poets Curran has invited to UCLA, Fulton said, and if UCLA’s poetry series folded, “that would be awful. I know the students really look forward to the readings. I think it makes such a difference to their education” to hear living poets read their work.

“I think a large part of why UCLA gets such wonderful poets is Doris herself,” Fulton added. “She must exert charm and influence to get them to read. She’s a friend to poets and a wonderful presence, not just an administrator.”

Curran and her artist husband, Darryl, live with seven cats in a small, tastefully furnished, 1930s house a few miles from campus. She often houses visiting writers. “I’ve put a goodish portion of my own salary into the program over the years” through feeding, housing and transporting series visitors, she said.

She jokingly described herself as a “broken-down English major” who worked as a clerk in the UCLA chancellor’s office in the late 1950s, moved up to run the UCLA art gallery (renamed the Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery in recent years) in the early 1960s, then joined the Cultural and Recreational Affairs Program in 1966.

As a cultural programmer she did everything from scheduling art and music events to negotiating with tree trimmers, she said, but running the poetry series was “always the part of the job that was most important to me.” Through the series, and through hosting informal parties for poets and writing faculty at her home, Curran has tried to create a greater sense of community among UCLA writers.

She began the series with a $1,000 budget in 1968. Her largest annual budget has been $8,000, she said. Events in the series are often co-sponsored by other campus departments.

Admission to the readings has always been free. “I’ve stood off charging admission forever. I don’t know how much longer that will work, but I think things like this should be available to people without charge,” Curran said.

Why has running the UCLA poetry series been so important to Curran? Her answer comes slowly.

“It’s a connection of sorts, it gives me something to do and people to care about, and an excuse for reading a lot,” she said.

“It’s also an excuse to force people to eat, to show off my cooking skills in the parties after readings--that’s probably the real answer.”

Alice Fulton will read her poems at UCLA’s Sunset Canyon Recreation Center at 8 p.m. Monday. Admission is free; parking is $4. The recreation center is located at Sunset Boulevard and Bellagio Drive in Westwood. Information: (213) 206-4897.